Computer applications are often written for ultimate sale in multiple markets of different languages. In applications requiring audio interaction with the end-user of the application, such as telephonic voice prompts, audio prompts and written phrases may be necessary to be translated in the language of the end-user.
When writing a program to execute audio prompts, such as a voice menu that a user can access over a telephone, a program must contain written phrases that can be converted to voice statements through the use of a “Text-to-Speech” program. Thus, a foreign language phrase would have to be correctly written in the proper grammatical order in a program to make sense to a user hearing the voice prompt when the written phrase is converted from text to speech. Audio prompt programs also often contain professionally recorded phrases wherein an individual speaking a particular language would have his or her voice recorded for each phrase that is necessary in the operation of a telephonic menu. For example, a voice mail program may have the phrases, “You have” and “new messages” prerecorded for the use in a telephonic menu that plays the audio prompt, “You have” {0} “new messages” wherein {0} is either a pre-recorded number or a text-to-speech of a numeric value.
Problems can occur in audio prompt programs when the program is used in markets having different languages. The written phrases used for both text-to-speech conversions as well as the voice prompts that are recorded from the written phrases would have to be properly translated and placed in the grammatically correct order if the audio prompt is to make sense to a telephone user listening to it. Coding multilingual prompts within an application can pose a serious burden to both the programmer and the translator. For the programmer, coding multilingual written phrases of the audio prompts can require a significant amount of time to enter phrases in a language that is foreign to the programmer. Additionally, in applications that are intended to be used in many different languages, the coding of written phrases and the inclusion of the various pre-recorded audio prompts for each additional language can significantly increase the overall size of the program. For the translator, translating written phrases to a local foreign language can require some knowledge of the computer language the application is being written in, an understanding of the code structure of the program, and specific coding techniques that a translator may not be well versed in.
Coding localized language phrases within a program can also greatly introduce errors into the program. The computer programmer is more likely to code misspellings and grammatical errors when coding phrases in a language that is foreign to the programmer. Conversely, if a translator codes the phrases in the program to avoid misspellings and grammatical errors, the translator is more likely to enter code errors into a program when the translator only nominally understands the programming process or the overall architecture of the program's structure.
In addition to the burdens upon the programmer and translator, hard-coding foreign language phrases and incorporating media files of pre-recorded audio prompts within a program causes the program, upon completion, to be inflexible to the addition of new languages without recompiling. Thus, it may be economically prohibitive to add a new language to an application where the market requiring the new language is not enough to justify the costs of entering additional code and recompiling the program.